20 June 2017

Fenestration!!!

To aid my fenestration, the word for today, I made nifty little template this morning. Time for a new and extremely sharp hobby knife blade.

Relax! It's nothing obscene, immoral, or lascivious. 'Fenestration' is just a fancy word architects use in relation to the placement of windows and doors. I must admit the need to look up the word in my trusty dictionary when I heard it for the first time in an architect's video on YouTube.

The meaning should have occurred to me given the similarity of the word to the German and Swedish words for 'window' (Fenster and fönster respectively. . . presumably the word is derived from the Latin.), but there you go. Funny how the ancient Romans remain with us in so many ways in 2017. "I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, this, that, and the other. . ."Anyway, I started applying the half-timbered effects to a few of my smaller building models yesterday, and that went reasonably well although the activity was time consuming. I also used a small plastic stencil full of rectangles, squares, circles, and other shapes to begin tracing in the windows and doors on the structures comprising my Baltic German town center. Again, a time consuming process and, shall we say, a bit imperfect. "Surely, there has to be a better way," thought I.So, this morning, after that first mug of coffee, as well as my daily feline lovefest following their daily treat of a small can of Fancy Feast, I set out to solve the problem at hand. Above, you'll observe the fruits of my 30 minutes or so of labor, a custom made stencil that enables me to quickly and easily trace in consistently sized doors and windows on model building walls. No fingertips were severed during the process. And it worked like a charm! Once the stencil was finished, I was able to outline the windows and doors on nine of the dozen new town buildings in about 20 minutes. All I have to do now is carefully paint in some translucent brown, to suggest the, ahem, fenestration, and Bob's your mother's brother. Stay tuned!-- Stokes

Having been defenestrated twice in my lifetime- once without the window being open. I can say with some authority that it is not pleasant- though since I was somewhat under the influence on one of those occasions I don't remember the journey only the arrival in the flower bed. It may be a bit late but a thought occours- etched brass windows- saves an awful lot of cutting out .An outfit called scale link used to to them on model railway scales so I'm sure there will be US alternatives. I found them awfully useful

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"Moin, moin en wellkomm na' Schtollen!"

Welcome to the fictitious land of shiny mid-18th century miniatures organized into LARGE units. I lay the blame for this madness squarely at the feet of hobby giants like Peter Gilder and Doug Mason, whose Napoleonics as seen in the hobby press of the times were a huge influence 35+ years ago. Much later, I stumbled upon Charge! Or How to Play War Games by Brigadier Peter Young and Colonel James Lawford. I was a certified goner by the time I purchased and read The War Game by Charles Grant, to see what all of the fuss was about, plus numerous more recent books and articles by one Brigadier (Ret.) C.S. Grant. Have a look around, leave a comment or two, and explore the blog thoroughly. You're sure to find all kinds of interesting and whimsical stuff here at the Grand Duchy of Stollen!